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11 November 2010 By Jonathan
Cook The
tranquility of Safed, a small Israeli city nestled
high in the hills of the
Upper Galilee close to the Lebanese border, is
not usually disturbed except by the occasional
pilgrimage by Madonna or other famous devotees of the
Jewish mystical teachings of Kabbalah. But in
the past few weeks, Safed -- one of Judaism's four
holy cities -- has been making headlines of a very
different kind.
Gideon Levy, a
columnist for the Israeli daily
Haaretz, last week declared it "the most
racist city in the country". The
unflattering, and hotly contested, epithet follows an
edict from Safed's senior rabbis ordering residents
not to sell or rent homes to "non-Jews" – a reference
to the country's Palestinian Arab citizens, who
comprise a fifth of Israel's
population. At an
emergency meeting, called last month to discuss the
dangers of "assimilation" caused by Arab men dating
Jewish women, the 18 rabbis warned that Safed was
facing an "Arab takeover". Jewish residents were told
to inform on neighbours who try to sell or rent to
Arabs. The
number of Arabs in the city, though low, has been
steadily rising as Safed Academic College has
expanded. There are now some 1,300 Arab students
enrolled at the school. The
rabbis' statements have provoked a series of riots by
local religious Jews, in which several Arab homes have
been attacked to chants of "Death to the Arabs". In
one recent incident, three Arab students were beaten
as shots were fired. So far
three Jewish youths, including an off-duty policeman,
have been charged with participating in the violence.
The policeman is accused of firing his gun. The
anti-Arab campaign escalated last week as posters were
plastered across the city threatening to burn down the
home of an elderly Jew if he did not stop renting to
Arab students. The
owner, 89-year-old Eli Zvieli, said the posters
appeared after he received phone threats and visits
from several rabbis warning him to change his mind. Jamil
Khalaili, 20, a physiotherapy student at the college
who rents an apartment with a friend in a Jewish
neighbourhood, said the atmosphere in Safed was
rapidly deteriorating. "We're
being treated like criminals, like we're trying to
steal their homes," he said. "It's got the point where
many of my friends are wondering whether to leave. I
want to study here but not if it costs me my life."
Leading the opposition to the presence of Arab
students in the city is Safed's chief rabbi, Shmuel
Eliyahu, who is employed by the municipality as head
of its religious council. "When
a non-Jew moves in, residents begin to worry about
their children, about their daughters. Many Arab
students have been known to date Jewish girls," he
told Israel National News, the
main news agency of the
settlement movement. The 18
rabbis issued their joint statement after learning of
the city's plan to build a medical school, which is
expected to draw Arab students from across the
Galilee. They
urged Jewish residents to shun a "neighbour or
acquaintance" who rents to Arabs. "Refrain from doing
business with him, deny him the right to read from the
Torah, and similarly ostracize him until
he renounces this harmful deed," it read. They
have been given backing by a former chief rabbi,
Ovadia Yosef, who used a recent sermon
to tell his followers that "selling to [non-Jews],
even for a lot of money, is not allowed. We won't let
them take control of us here."
Similar anti-Arab sentiments have been heard in two
other Jewish cities in the Galilee, Karmiel and Upper
Nazareth. Both were established decades ago as part of
a government "Judaisation" programme to settle more
Jews in the country's most heavily Arab-populated
region. In
Karmiel, 30km west of Safed, ads in local newspapers
have been promoting a special email address for
residents to inform on neighbours planning to sell
homes to Arabs. According to Ynet, a popular news
website, the email account is overseen by officials
for Oren Milstein, the city's deputy mayor until he
was fired last week.
Adi
Eldar, the mayor, said Mr Milstein had "damaged the
city's image" after he gave a newspaper interview in
which he boasted that he had prevented the sale of 30
homes to Arab families. Mr
Milstein's replacement as deputy mayor, Rina
Greenberg, is a member of the far-right
Yisrael Beiteinu party of
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign
minister, who advocates ridding the country of many of
its Arab citizens.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, Shimon Gapso,
who is also allied Yisrael Beiteinu, has announced
plans to build a new neighbourhood for 3,000 religious
Jews to halt what he called the city's "demographic
deterioration".
Hundreds of Arab families from neighbouring Nazareth
have relocated to the Jewish city to escape
overcrowding. Today, one in eight of Upper Nazareth's
42,000-strong population is Arab. In
August, Mr Gapso said he felt "as happy as if I had a
new baby" at the news that 15 extremist families from
the former Gaza settlement of Gush Katif were
establishing a Jewish seminary in his city. Hatia
Chomsky-Porat, who leads Galilee activists for Sikkuy,
a group advocating better relations between Jews and
Arabs, said: "The political atmosphere is growing
darker all the time. Racism among Jews is entirely
mainstream now." In
Safed, the
Arab student body,
heavily outnumbered by nearly 40,000 Jewish residents,
has tried to keep a low profile. However, one small
act of defiance appears to have further contributed to
Jewish residents' fears of a "takeover".
Inhabitants awoke recently to find a
Palestinian flag draped on the top of a
renovated mosque -- one of the many old stone
buildings in Safed that attest to the city's
habitation long before Israel's establishment. In
1948, when Jewish forces captured the town, Safed was
a mixed city of 10,000 Palestinians and 2,000 Jews.
All the Palestinian inhabitants were expelled,
including a 13-year-old
Mahmoud Abbas,
now the president of the Palestinian Authority. Mr
Khaliali said the city's history appeared still to
haunt many of its Jewish residents, who expressed
fears that Arab students were there to reclaim refugee
property as the vanguard of a movement for the
Palestinian right of return. It is
not the first time Mr
Eliyahu, the
son of a former chief rabbi of Israel, has been
accused of inciting against the city's Arab
population. In
2002, during a wave of suicide attacks at the start of
the
second intifada,
he called on Safed college to expel all Arab students.
Two
years later he launched a campaign against
intermarriage, accusing Arab men of waging "another
form of war" against Jewish women by "seducing" them.
He
narrowly avoided prosecution for incitement in 2006
after he agreed to retract his earlier statements. The
Religious Action Centre, a group of
Reform movement Jews, and several Arab
MPs have demanded that Yehuda Weinstein, the
attorney-general, investigate Mr Eliyahu and the other
rabbis for incitement to violence.
Jonathan Cook
is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran and the
Plan to Remake the
Middle East"
(Pluto
Press) and "Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net. |
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